After this aside the hunter threw his rifle on his shoulder and started in his turn, followed by Curumilla. Valentine and his comrade were on foot: they preferred that mode of travelling, which seemed to them sure, and quite as quick as on horseback. The two men, after the Indian custom, walked one behind the other, not uttering a syllable; but toward midday the heat became so insupportable that they were obliged to stop to take a few moments' repose. At length the sunbeams lost their strength, the evening breeze rose, and the hunters could resume their journey. They soon reached the banks of the Rio Puerco (Dirty River), which they began ascending, keeping as close as they could to the banks, while following the tracks made since time immemorial by wild animals coming down to drink.
The man unacquainted with the splendid American scenery will have a difficulty in imagining the imposing and savage majesty of the prairie the hunters were traversing. The river, studded with islets covered with cottonwood trees, flowed silent and rapid between banks of slight elevation, and overgrown with grass so tall that it obeyed the impulse of the wind from a long distance. Over the vast plain were scattered innumerable hills, whose summits, nearly all of the same height, present a flat surface; and for a greater distance northward the ground was broadcast with large lumps of pebbles resembling gravestones.
At a few hundred yards from the river rose a conical mound, bearing on its summit a granite obelisk one hundred and twenty feet in height. The Indians, who, like all primitive nations, are caught by anything strange, frequently assembled at this spot; and here the hecatombs are offered to the Kitchi Manitou.
A great number of buffalo skulls, piled up at the foot of the column, and arranged in circles, ellipses, and other geometrical figures, attest their piety for this god of the hunt, whose protecting spirit, they say, looks down from the top of the monolith. Here and there grew patches of the Indian potato, wild onion, prairie tomato, and those millions of strange flowers and trees composing the American flora. The rest of the country was covered with tall grass, continually undulating beneath the light footfall of the graceful antelopes or big horns, which bounded from one rock to the other, startled by the approach of the travellers.
Far, far away on the horizon, mingling with the azure of the sky, appeared the denuded peaks of the lofty mountains that serve as unassailable fortresses to the Indians: their summits, covered with eternal snow, formed the frame of this immense and imposing picture, which was stamped with a gloomy and mysterious grandeur.
At the hour when the maukawis uttered its last song to salute the setting of the sun, which, half plunged in the purple of evening, still jaspered the sky with long red bands, the travellers perceived the tents of the Comanches picturesquely grouped on the sides of a verdurous hill. The Indians had, in a few hours, improvised a real village with their buffalo skin tents, aligned to form streets and squares.
On arriving at about five hundred yards from the village the hunters suddenly perceived an Indian horseman. Evincing not the slightest surprise, they stopped and unfolded their buffalo robes, which floated in the breeze, as a signal of peace. The horseman uttered a loud cry. At this signal—for it was evidently one—a troop of Comanche warriors debouched at a gallop from the village, and poured like a torrent down the sides of the hill, coming up close to the motionless travellers, brandishing their weapons, and uttering their war yell.
The hunters waited, carelessly leaning on their guns. Assuredly, to a man not acquainted with the singular manners of the prairie, this mode of reception would have seemed overt hostilities. But it was not so; for, on coming within range of the hunters, the Comanches began making their horses leap and curvet with that grace and skill characteristic of the Indians, and deploying to the right and left, they formed a vast circle, inclosing the two unmoved hunters.
Then a horseman quitted the group, dismounted, and rapidly approached the newcomers: the latter hastened to meet him. All three had their arm extended with the palm forward in sign of peace. The Indian who thus advanced to meet the hunters was Unicorn, the great chief of the Comanches.
As a distinctive sign of his race, his skin was of a red tinge, brighter than the palest new copper. He was a man of thirty at the most, with masculine and expressive features; his face possessed a remarkable intelligence, and was stamped with that natural majesty found among the savage children of the prairie; he was tall and well built; and his muscular limbs evidenced a vigour and suppleness against which few men would have contended with advantage.